Sprezzatura: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Damn
The Italian Secret to Living Well Involves a Whole Lot of Olive Oil, Cigarettes, and Wine
‘Everything passes.’
This man is not worried about his LDL cholesterol. This man does not know what LDL cholesterol is, and if you tried to explain it to him he would wave his hand at you like you were a fly that had landed on his fried eggplant. He has the resting heart rate of a hibernating bear and the blood pressure of a man who has never once checked his blood pressure.
People keep posting him next to Bryan Johnson.
He takes over a hundred pills a day. He goes to bed at 8:30 pm. He eats his last meal at 11 in the morning, which is not dinner, that is brunch, and then he fasts until the next day like a medieval monk who sold a payments company. At one point he was pumping his own teenage son’s blood plasma into his body, which is a sentence I want you to sit with, because a man did that ON PURPOSE, with DOCTORS PRESENT, and nobody called anybody.
His program is called Blueprint and his motto, his actual motto, is “Don’t Die.”
The Italian guy’s chest says everything passes. The millionaire’s religion says don’t die. One of these men understands the universe. The other one measures his nighttime erections with a machine.
(He does. There is a graph.)
Now sit down, because I am going to explain why the old man is winning, and it is not the cigarettes.
I am Italian. Italians are issued a protocol at birth. We do not get a choice in this. Somewhere between the baptism and the first time an aunt pinches your cheek hard enough to leave evidence, the protocol is installed, and the protocol is one word.
Sprezzatura.
An Italian courtier named Castiglione coined it five hundred years ago, and the fancy definition is “studied carelessness,” the art of doing difficult things while appearing not to try. But the street definition, the one my people actually live by, is simpler. It is the art of not giving a fuck. Not the lazy kind. The earned kind. The kind that belongs to a man who has looked directly at the chaos of existence, shrugged, and poured himself another glass.
Because Italians know something, and we are raised on it the way other kids are raised on cartoons. Family, yes. God, yes. Food that could resurrect the dead, obviously. Our Spanish cousins have most of that too, and God bless them. But the thing that is purely ours, the thing woven into the DNA next to the gene for arguing with your hands, is this. The deep cellular knowledge that everything passes. The empire fell. The plague came. The in laws visited. Tutto passa. All of it. You were never going to outrun it, so stop running.
Here is what happens to a person who forgets this. They get antsy. They start optimizing. Their body fills up with cortisol, the stress hormone, the body’s way of preparing you to be chased by a lion, except there is no lion, there is just an email from Brad in accounting, so the cortisol sits there marinating your organs like a bad brine. They get tired. They get sluggish. Their face starts doing that gray thing. They age in fast forward, and then, in a panic, they try to buy their youth back, which is how you end up with a man in his forties who has spent the GDP of a small island nation on his own body and came out the other side looking like a haunted department store mannequin.
The scientists have half figured this out, by the way. They keep flying to Sardinia to study why Italian villagers live to 100, and they come back with papers about “diet” and “community” and “low chronic stress,” and the villagers keep telling them the same thing, which is, roughly translated, “we drink wine and we don’t worry,” and the scientists write that down and fly home and get back on their treadmill desks.
Meanwhile the nonno in the photo is out there glowing like a bronze god. He drinks. He smokes. He is, by all photographic evidence, having a much better time romantically than the man who sleeps alone in a laboratory at 8:30 pm. He drenches everything he eats in olive oil, poured from a giant tin, like a man watering a garden. And he eats that fried eggplant a minimum of three times a week, a number I am confident in because I know his type, I am related to his type, I have watched his type live to 96 while outliving two cardiologists.
Which brings me to the punchline, the part where God reveals He has a sense of humor. Bryan Johnson also believes in olive oil. He believes in it so much that he SELLS it. It is part of the Blueprint product line, and he named it, I need you to trust me here, “Snake Oil.”
He named his olive oil Snake Oil. On purpose. As a joke. The man spent two million dollars a year to discover what my grandmother kept next to the stove, then branded it after the universal symbol for health fraud, and the internet nodded and said “take my money.”
Tutto passa, indeed.
So here is the whole op ed, the entire thesis, free of charge, from an old wolf who has seen a few things.
Calm down. Life is a chaotic mess. It has always been a chaotic mess. It was a mess when Rome was burning and it was a mess when your great grandfather got on the boat, and the people who survived it best were not the ones with the most sensors attached to their bodies.
They were the ones who understood that everything passes, the good and the bad and the truly weird, and that your job is not to escape the river but to float in it. Preferably on your back. Preferably with a full stomach.
You have two roads in front of you. Down one road there is olive oil, a little wine, people who love you loudly, and the serene knowledge that none of this was ever in your control anyway. Down the other road there is a clipboard, a hundred pills, an 11 am dinner, a machine that watches you sleep, and a mirror that gets more upsetting every year no matter how much you spend.
One road ends at 100 years old with a tattoo and a tan.
The other one ends at “Don’t Die,” which, I have checked, is not an available option.
If this article saved you two million dollars a year, consider sending a tiny fraction of the savings this way. A paid subscription costs less than a single bottle of Snake Oil, and unlike Byran Johnson, I can tell you exactly where the money goes. Olive oil. Keeping the lights on. And someday, God willing, a newsvan, which I intend to drive with sprezzatura, meaning slowly, with one arm out the window, worried about nothing.
Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.
Between my wife and I, our longest living grandparent is grandpa Bob. Grandpa Bob was a used car salesman, smoke, drank, and knew most the hookers in NorthWest Arkansas. Grandpa Bob loves to fish, lives to fish..... and so do his 2 sons who take him fishing all the time. He is as happy as can be with a beer in one hand and a rod in the other surrounded by his boys. He will be 94 soon and still going stong even though he should have been dead probably 20 years ago.
This was great! 😄